I wonder if they went straight to "AI" as an insult independently from the older generations, or if they were using "slop" like the rest of us but had to adopt a new insult because "slop" has been co-opted to refer to things that are terrible whether AI or not.
Why? Serious question, they completely lack the context essential to understand, the previous generation does not seem to have an improved understanding either, they are just users. Consumers of ads.
Parents around me are somehow quite aware of the problems, some more deeper in, some less:
Esp. the ones from the education group are, agains my expectation, very well educated and up-to-date regarding problems of all this stuff. So, yes. For sure, Im in a bubble and I do not know about people & their society outside of my bubble.
The problem with that though, they don't really get to see what great feats a healthy adult brain is allegedly capable of, for example from their parents, nor their teachers if we're being honest for a millisecond. So why bother? Offline adult brains have failed at preventing any of this - nor are they more successful. It's really not brain health that predicts success in 2026.
> Do you really think young people around 14-16 understand the impact of doomscrolling & 15 sec videos on their brain capacities?
Yes, they do. Social media is, ironically, full of young Gen-Z rediscovering the joys of the analog world, saying they want to get off social media, looking into dumb phones. You don't see many "grown adults" talking about it. They're too far gone.
They can't even use a computer, they struggle with basic computer knowledge because they grow up with closed ecosystems and most of them only have smartphones, not a desktop PC. They are called "Digital Naives" (sic) for a reason.
The use of personal computers way overshot what they were designed for. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption designed for. Don't mistake people putting up with the relative complexity of personal computing with them wanting it. That's why so many people no longer bother with PCs or keep an old one around just for things that need to be done and through the web. Phones, primarily, and tablets for media consumption, are much easier to use.
Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.
Every generation is full of people that have a strong aversion to tech. The mistake was thinking it would magically only be the Boomers with that problem, but I've always known people in my age group who needed that remedial tech class in college.
It did appear to improve for a little while when everyone needed a laptop or desktop to access the Internet. But smartphones have eliminated that. So have tablets. And lightweight laptops like Chromebooks have further eliminated the need for tech knowledge. I work at a K-12 school, and a surprisingly large number of young parents have access to the Internet only through their smartphones. And, truthfully, they don't need a PC to access the Internet anymore. It's an extra cost you can just bypass, and nobody under 30 with kids has spare money at this point.
But, in as much as new teachers coming into our district today are often just as tech-illiterate as those we saw 20 years ago, we haven't seen the number of tech-savvy people really decreasing, either. Tech remains a hobby for some people, and that doesn't seem to be decreasing.
Yes, we're not going to raise another generation where the techies have a common background of making MS-DOS boot disks; reading modem initialization strings; upgrading RAM requiring a chip puller or piggybacking; managing IRQs, memory addresses, or bus addressing for ISA/IDE hardware with jumpers or DIP switches; or knowing what `LOAD"*",8,1` means. But that doesn't mean people aren't learning tech, having fun with it, or making careers out of it.
They can't use a Windows-95-style filesystem for the same reason I can't use IBM-style JCL and COBOL. That is not the entire field of computing, in fact it's barely any of the field of computing which is the reason they can't use it. Just because that paradigm was once dominant, doesn't mean it still is.
But they are all still using traditional file systems constantly, but usually through an abstraction that gives them less understanding and control. Dragging stuff around on a smart phone is often changing some files and folders under the hood. The knowledge of how things work one step down the abstraction layer is still valuable for anyone who wants more than the lowest level control and understanding of what they're doing.
Do they have the motivation to learn though? You could say the same about gen Z with books; it's just that many have never cared enough to make it a habit.
That having been said, the new generation mostly does computing with a smartphone/tablet and these kids are very adept at handling them. If a child wants something, it'll find a way to make it happen and they're good at that. Creating spreadsheets and organizing files is simply not on their list. If it were, they'd be better at it than most people who grew up before computers.
Maybe the impacts but Gen Z at least the younger ones really struggle with technology. Things like file systems (even the gui kind) and the keys in a keyboard - had one ask me what’s a semicolon, he was a fully formed adult. They are not digital natives they were raised from behind the walls of the iGarden.
It’s the opposite reason , for them social media is everything, and if that’s ai , it’s not cool , influencers don’t like it , until new ai influencers will emerge and will break a stereotype. It’s a s simple as that
I think the key is that young people get to approach new technology playfully, over-use it, and make mistakes.
I learned lessons as a teenager on Twitter in 2012 that clearly none of the middle-aged people posting constantly on the company Slack ever internalized.
I can't imagine what gave you that idea. I find there is a small slice of people who actually understand technology and it's massively underrepresented by the younger generations. They have no concept of files/folders or how the computer works at any level. Their views are often half-baked (I know mine were) and the news never actually portrays what the majority are thinking. The news is much more interested in quick hits and shock pieces "Kids are going back to dumb phones" (no they aren't), "Kids are using paper maps" (nope, a few people find them quirky and treat them as art, they aren't using them).
You and he are using “understand” differently. You’re talking about understanding the internals, the components and concepts inside the box labeled “technology”; he’s talking about understanding the externalities, where that box is moving and how fast, how the box affects and alters the world around it.
> I am more and more convinced that young people have a much better understanding of technology and especially its impact on society.
People are taking your words to the literal meaning and miss the forest for the trees.
Kids aren't conditioned by society and are more in touch with their instinctual drives than adult people. They are much more keen to perceive that a piece of technology isn't "good" or "natural" or "desirable" without being able to form a reasoned argument. Any kid grown on an iPad is able to tell that it's an unnatural environment, and less preferable than growing up among and being cared by other humans.
It's a bit like that IQ curve meme, where the uneducated person (the children in this case) and genius agree that the modern world has gone too far, while the average adult self-indulgently defends our modern world, crying that we should be grateful to technology and if it weren't for it we would be dying of dysentery and we shouldn't resist AI but just learn to embrace it, yadda yadda.
I'd rather trust the instincts of a kid than the rationalizations of many adults, in this case.
Wonderful writeup, I couldn't have formulated it better! Honestly, I never expected my comment to gain traction but I find it interesting that it had such resonance in both directions.
In a way I am happy I left so much to the imagination for open interpretation.
Doesn't tell us anything. This would be good if that meant they've developed some kind of "taste" for human output, I highly doubt it and for sure it would not reduce over-reliance on "AI" for school homework. I will not be surprised when this will be considered a "lost generation" from many point of views.
It's just the new term for "NPC" (like "My teacher is such an NPC"), meaning someone/something is bland or generic (like a non-playable character in a video game).
Why do we need to decipher this like its some abstract concept? While AI's output is impressive to older generations clearly younger folks think its ass otherwise it wouldn't be an insult.
In the world of arts/media, I think AI basically only has a future as a hidden thing. Openly admitting that you used AI to make something will be used against you, in order to dismiss your work. For a lot of people/things, it already is - see Hank Green, or the daily comments about "I don't want to read what you didn't write."
Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
That used to be true of autotune too. It was either tastefully hidden, or obvious and trashy. Then projects like 808s and Heartbreak and Tha Carter III put it front and center and it's been a legitimate tool ever since.
I didn't know if generative ai has a strong enough signature to go through the same evolution, but I wouldn't be shocked if it did.
Autotune, and quantization in general, is a legitimate artistic choice though. It's like using a ruler. It's not strictly required either.
AI is literally the exact opposite of that. We had been building software with ruler-like precision even when it was unnecessary and got in the way. That's the only reason we ever wanted AI to begin with.
The mistake people keep making is the assumption that arbitrary and probabilistic imprecision ("wisdom of the crowd") is automatically equivalent to artistic or experienced/curated choice. It's absolutely not.
Check out some off Connor O’Malley’s YouTube videos lately. He’s a collaborator with Tim Robinson and has an absurdist take with heavy AI used
What I’m saying is he made an explicit artistic choice to use AI and it’s an integral part of the work. You can’t tell a creative person they aren’t allowed to do something.
AI is going to be used, and already is used, by creative people for legitimate uses that only enhance the statements they are making.
The fact that lazy people are using it as a shortcut for a lazy audience is not an indictment of AI
Yeah, I'm not saying there's no artistic value in using AI.
I'm saying that less intentional use has less artistic merit. AI hasn't made an impact on the toil involved in the creative process. It's instead another brush.
It all boils down to the fact that humans are not outsourcing anything to AI. If anything, it just raises the bar and makes humans have to work harder. Decision fatigue was already a problem long before this era of AI, and AI can make it worse.
That's exactly what happened to music with beat quantization and autotune. People just zoomed in, nerded out, got snobbier, stopped seeing the forest for the trees, and ultimately produced very boring music from exhaustion.
> You can’t tell a creative person they aren’t allowed to do something.
That sums it up for me. This "new thing appears, become hot, gets overplayed, people hate it" cycle happens over and over, but that is trendy norms. Meanwhile, creative use will continue to go up and to the right as people learn how to better wield AI to express themselves.
The future won't be "AI in art is bad" but "AI as a tool of artists is powerful, AI as an artist is nonsensical".
Autotune is legitimate as a surgical tool, used as little as necessary so you can't ever hear it, not when it's front and center as they have tried to do in the 2010 era of awful.
AI is still in the 2010 autotune phase, where more is better.
Though if 2010, the year that Lost in the World was released, is your marker of an awful era, then I suspect that when generative ai does get used to create real art you will likely not be a fan of that either.
there's an artistic effect I keep seeing that only works with generative AI. It seems to be alternating traditional transforms (translate, rotate, scale, perspective, color shift, take your pick of anything you want) with diffusion steps to bring the resulting image back to the same semantic prompt every frame. Looks trippy, like the image is moving, yet also staying the same (like a Shepard tone), and also constantly drifting in details
It’s autoslop can become an adjective for Generative AI content whether it’s hidden or not. It’s so AI - can mean different things to different generations - derogatory for Gen Alpha and like a good thing for older generations
I really doubt it. I think more and more people will get used to it and accept it. It's not going anywhere. The best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them and then what will the rest of the artists and creatives do? Refuse to engage with modernity? I doubt it.
It only takes a single project to show it works to get other people jumping on board. Some amount of gamers are pretty vocal about it (though I'm sure it's being used in most studios these days in some fashion). If a company creates a game which embraces the "slop" and has great assets on a fun game are people going to avoid it? If that works out, will companies following them avoid it? That's just not how people work.
> he best artists and creators will figure out how to use tech which empowers them
But that is NOT the selling point of AI in relation to art. The selling point is "it will make all artists obsolete and unemployable". Literally. That is how Sora was sold too. It was not sold as tool for artists. It was sold as replacement for artist.
If AI ends up as a tool for artists, then that tech failed on its creators terms.
It allows them to take on tasks they could not before.
For example, creating a game where before you'd have to pay for assets or creating a movie to where you'd have to pay for a lot of various things. I gave an example earlier where I've watched vids people generated based on existing fiction. These are artists (you're still framing the shot, selecting dialogue, etc), and they could not have done this before; it would have been too expensive.
Some artists get cut out of the loop but it allows small teams to do what was impossible. Is this not valid?
I would argue these are influencers and “content creators” cosplaying as artists, taking shortcuts and never bothering to hone their craft or cultivate their taste. Net result is tons more low-effort content and outright spam in the world, not some creative golden era.
I went to buy a new phone about a year ago - all the branding/blurbs etc was "AI this! AI that!"
I didn't end up buying at that point, but 6 months ago my existing phone failed, so I had to return to the shops. Same phones for sale more or less, but not a single word about AI anywhere.
I actually agree with your prediction (on a longer time-scale though) but because I'm convinced it'll go the opposite, where AI begins to blend in to services people use in the background more and more, and people slowly move on and stop caring about it, both in terms of hype and doomerism.
> Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
The slogan that keeps coming to mind to me is 'AI has a massive PR problem'
When such a disruptive and powerful technology is made popular by slop art that denigrates artists and shits upon the cultural value of the arts, by unlikeable billionaires telling people how you'll soon be out of a job, by having it forced upon you by your boss, by marketing teams pushing for doomerism to increase the IPO value, you know that no PR campaign will ever save it and make it palatable for the masses.
I think it will create two media economies. One economy of garbage slopware made for and by companies and people who don't care about anything, and one for people who actually find enjoyment from the process of creation, not from whatever polished turd comes out the end.
AI seems like a better derogatory adjective for most AI generated tweets, comments, blogs, reels, slop grenades that’s thrown at us these days. I wish a better adjective or slang comes along that clearly means inauthentic content
My Gen Alpha kids have what I suspect is a common attitude towards ai:
Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.
Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.
He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.
I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.
If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.
> I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s.
i.e. it sucked. I learnt on Apple BASIC also, and I'm not sure I'd wish that experience on anyone. It was so bad you had to print out your code on a dot matrix printer to debug with a pen! Anything complex took forever to execute. I remember plotting the mandlebrot set in full screen resolution (192x192 or something! whoa, crazy times ...) with 100 max iter, and it was an overnight run!
Give me a linux box and today's HLLs any day. Learning to code, and learning to code well, is so much easier now. Any language you want is just a package manager command away, there are amazing and free IDEs, and everything is just a million times more conducive to coding than it ever was back in the 80s.
Oh absolutely. The resources and features these days are incomparable to the stone tools of the 80s and 90s. I’m just saying that specifically getting started was much easier. My friends and I could trade disks of BAS files and not have a single comment or README to explain what your dev environment needed to look like. We didn’t have to have GitHub accounts. I love GitHub, but trying to help kids manage a million accounts just to get some sample code is a nightmare. It mostly works unauthenticated but thanks to bots the limits are low and abrupt. Ironically getting AIs to just make up similar content is far easier!
Anyway, I don’t want to pretend Apple BASIC was better than Python or whatever, but I never had to learn “no it’s venv now not virtualenv and make sure you’re not using system Python just install docker via brew and it will be easier…” until I was getting paid to deal with that nonsense.
My elementary-aged kids call AI-generated content "slop" and actively ask me if some videos on Youtube are slop before watching them. I'm proud. I think they will be able to detect AI manipulated content far better than older generations.
Found a (many years old) video of an oranutang driving a golf cart -> "dad that's AI can't believe you fell for that"
"Kids come on beans are good for you, you can't have dessert without also eating your beans" -> "That's not true beans are unhealthy you got that from AI"
Even seemingly unrelated shit "Clean your room", or "No it's time for bed your brain needs sleep" -> "that's so AI"
I suspect "That's so AI" is just the bad toupee fallacy in action. People only notice the blatant, unpolished slop and meanwhile, the seamless stuff slips right past undetected.
What's ironic is that while kids have seemingly always had a nose for the inauthentic, they have just about no way to express anything of their own identity.
Even way back in the 90s we could tell that Coca Cola isn't actually a requirement for a good Christmas, and your friends who wore platform shoes were not somehow unique.
But still, when you're young you're in a prison. There are very few things you can do that aren't connected to some corporation whose main goal is just to make money.
"Is "That's AI" the new "six-seven"? No, this bit of slang means something: the young people have simply broadened the definition of AI to make it equivalent to "bullshit"."
I'm always dubious of news reporting on supposed trends for young people. The press regularly makes them up. There's no evidence provided in this article that this is some sort of popular phrase.
This FAQ is hilarious. I guess the default assumption is that if kids say something they don't actually mean it or know what it means. But no, they do. Often they are just using language in a more advanced generalized way than you, rather than being confined to distinct boxes. Children's brains are language factories.
We keep perpetuating one of the largest psyops and disingenuous campaigns of our time. This collective psychosis of "blaming" AI for things made by humans and refusing to hold humans accountable for their transgressions is sad and heartbreaking.
How do we keep falling for this, over and over again? It's old tactics in new names; stop falling for tricks people use to evade your scrutiny and accountability and grow up past your infantilism and naivety. If you are reading this you are likely an adult, and probably a smart one. You can handle some discomfort and I implore you to see past this mainstream carricature of the truth.
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[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 7.2 ms ] threadDo you really think young people around 14-16 understand the impact of doomscrolling & 15 sec videos on their brain capacities?
To put just one example.
Esp. the ones from the education group are, agains my expectation, very well educated and up-to-date regarding problems of all this stuff. So, yes. For sure, Im in a bubble and I do not know about people & their society outside of my bubble.
Yes, they do. Social media is, ironically, full of young Gen-Z rediscovering the joys of the analog world, saying they want to get off social media, looking into dumb phones. You don't see many "grown adults" talking about it. They're too far gone.
Try explaining a clutch and stick shift to kids. They will look at you and wonder why and how you think having a pedal that decouples the engine from the rest of the drivetrain so you can manually operate a gear lever was appropriate for a mass market product.
It did appear to improve for a little while when everyone needed a laptop or desktop to access the Internet. But smartphones have eliminated that. So have tablets. And lightweight laptops like Chromebooks have further eliminated the need for tech knowledge. I work at a K-12 school, and a surprisingly large number of young parents have access to the Internet only through their smartphones. And, truthfully, they don't need a PC to access the Internet anymore. It's an extra cost you can just bypass, and nobody under 30 with kids has spare money at this point.
But, in as much as new teachers coming into our district today are often just as tech-illiterate as those we saw 20 years ago, we haven't seen the number of tech-savvy people really decreasing, either. Tech remains a hobby for some people, and that doesn't seem to be decreasing.
Yes, we're not going to raise another generation where the techies have a common background of making MS-DOS boot disks; reading modem initialization strings; upgrading RAM requiring a chip puller or piggybacking; managing IRQs, memory addresses, or bus addressing for ISA/IDE hardware with jumpers or DIP switches; or knowing what `LOAD"*",8,1` means. But that doesn't mean people aren't learning tech, having fun with it, or making careers out of it.
That having been said, the new generation mostly does computing with a smartphone/tablet and these kids are very adept at handling them. If a child wants something, it'll find a way to make it happen and they're good at that. Creating spreadsheets and organizing files is simply not on their list. If it were, they'd be better at it than most people who grew up before computers.
I learned lessons as a teenager on Twitter in 2012 that clearly none of the middle-aged people posting constantly on the company Slack ever internalized.
People are taking your words to the literal meaning and miss the forest for the trees.
Kids aren't conditioned by society and are more in touch with their instinctual drives than adult people. They are much more keen to perceive that a piece of technology isn't "good" or "natural" or "desirable" without being able to form a reasoned argument. Any kid grown on an iPad is able to tell that it's an unnatural environment, and less preferable than growing up among and being cared by other humans.
It's a bit like that IQ curve meme, where the uneducated person (the children in this case) and genius agree that the modern world has gone too far, while the average adult self-indulgently defends our modern world, crying that we should be grateful to technology and if it weren't for it we would be dying of dysentery and we shouldn't resist AI but just learn to embrace it, yadda yadda.
I'd rather trust the instincts of a kid than the rationalizations of many adults, in this case.
In a way I am happy I left so much to the imagination for open interpretation.
Our college library is having a surge of requests for new fiction.
I wonder if this is a combination of burnout and good old fashioned rebellion.
Expect a massive marketing reversal in 6-12 months, when every "AI-powered" company removes the keyword from their home page.
I didn't know if generative ai has a strong enough signature to go through the same evolution, but I wouldn't be shocked if it did.
Nah, they were still keen to let people know it made you a clown.
AI is literally the exact opposite of that. We had been building software with ruler-like precision even when it was unnecessary and got in the way. That's the only reason we ever wanted AI to begin with.
The mistake people keep making is the assumption that arbitrary and probabilistic imprecision ("wisdom of the crowd") is automatically equivalent to artistic or experienced/curated choice. It's absolutely not.
What I’m saying is he made an explicit artistic choice to use AI and it’s an integral part of the work. You can’t tell a creative person they aren’t allowed to do something.
AI is going to be used, and already is used, by creative people for legitimate uses that only enhance the statements they are making.
The fact that lazy people are using it as a shortcut for a lazy audience is not an indictment of AI
I'm saying that less intentional use has less artistic merit. AI hasn't made an impact on the toil involved in the creative process. It's instead another brush.
It all boils down to the fact that humans are not outsourcing anything to AI. If anything, it just raises the bar and makes humans have to work harder. Decision fatigue was already a problem long before this era of AI, and AI can make it worse.
That's exactly what happened to music with beat quantization and autotune. People just zoomed in, nerded out, got snobbier, stopped seeing the forest for the trees, and ultimately produced very boring music from exhaustion.
That sums it up for me. This "new thing appears, become hot, gets overplayed, people hate it" cycle happens over and over, but that is trendy norms. Meanwhile, creative use will continue to go up and to the right as people learn how to better wield AI to express themselves.
The future won't be "AI in art is bad" but "AI as a tool of artists is powerful, AI as an artist is nonsensical".
AI is still in the 2010 autotune phase, where more is better.
Though if 2010, the year that Lost in the World was released, is your marker of an awful era, then I suspect that when generative ai does get used to create real art you will likely not be a fan of that either.
Or 22, A Million by Bon Iver.
It only takes a single project to show it works to get other people jumping on board. Some amount of gamers are pretty vocal about it (though I'm sure it's being used in most studios these days in some fashion). If a company creates a game which embraces the "slop" and has great assets on a fun game are people going to avoid it? If that works out, will companies following them avoid it? That's just not how people work.
But that is NOT the selling point of AI in relation to art. The selling point is "it will make all artists obsolete and unemployable". Literally. That is how Sora was sold too. It was not sold as tool for artists. It was sold as replacement for artist.
If AI ends up as a tool for artists, then that tech failed on its creators terms.
For example, creating a game where before you'd have to pay for assets or creating a movie to where you'd have to pay for a lot of various things. I gave an example earlier where I've watched vids people generated based on existing fiction. These are artists (you're still framing the shot, selecting dialogue, etc), and they could not have done this before; it would have been too expensive.
Some artists get cut out of the loop but it allows small teams to do what was impossible. Is this not valid?
God I hope so! Modernity sucks.
I didn't end up buying at that point, but 6 months ago my existing phone failed, so I had to return to the shops. Same phones for sale more or less, but not a single word about AI anywhere.
Historically, including "AI" in a name meant it wasn't complete or ready for prime time use.
I'm not convinced our AI nor ML implementations that throw "AI-powered" into the marketing copy have meaningfully changed that notion.
We don't call spellcheck "SpellcheckAI" or "SpellcheckML" but it is arguably one of the best integrations of AI we've ever seen.
The slogan that keeps coming to mind to me is 'AI has a massive PR problem'
When such a disruptive and powerful technology is made popular by slop art that denigrates artists and shits upon the cultural value of the arts, by unlikeable billionaires telling people how you'll soon be out of a job, by having it forced upon you by your boss, by marketing teams pushing for doomerism to increase the IPO value, you know that no PR campaign will ever save it and make it palatable for the masses.
And it's for the best, I'll say.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/sep/07/death-o...
Disdainfully dismissing genai media with “that’s so ai” as cited.
Eager to use it to explore. My 10yo would love to research his favorite subjects- Pokemon, WWI fighter aces, Sweden, Weird Al - with a chatbot. I give him Wikipedia and books instead and he’s happy.
He tinkers with coding and ai is so useful for that. Outside of Scratch most programming has incredibly obnoxious environments to setup. He can’t install anything at school. He doesn’t want to edit PATH variables or choose a dev server for simple html/css/js. AI can almost always find a way forward and let him get to the tinkering.
I learned on Apple BASIC and Microsoft QBASIC. One magic keystroke or one command and you were in a dev environment that matched everyone else’s. If a book was written for the computers I had access to, “setup” was nil. I was tinkering instantly and with a high level language shockingly close to the metal.
If genai helps Gen Alpha cut through the incredibly deep pile of abstractions on modern programming platforms, then great! Keep kids hacking.
i.e. it sucked. I learnt on Apple BASIC also, and I'm not sure I'd wish that experience on anyone. It was so bad you had to print out your code on a dot matrix printer to debug with a pen! Anything complex took forever to execute. I remember plotting the mandlebrot set in full screen resolution (192x192 or something! whoa, crazy times ...) with 100 max iter, and it was an overnight run!
Give me a linux box and today's HLLs any day. Learning to code, and learning to code well, is so much easier now. Any language you want is just a package manager command away, there are amazing and free IDEs, and everything is just a million times more conducive to coding than it ever was back in the 80s.
Anyway, I don’t want to pretend Apple BASIC was better than Python or whatever, but I never had to learn “no it’s venv now not virtualenv and make sure you’re not using system Python just install docker via brew and it will be easier…” until I was getting paid to deal with that nonsense.
"Kids come on beans are good for you, you can't have dessert without also eating your beans" -> "That's not true beans are unhealthy you got that from AI"
Even seemingly unrelated shit "Clean your room", or "No it's time for bed your brain needs sleep" -> "that's so AI"
Even way back in the 90s we could tell that Coca Cola isn't actually a requirement for a good Christmas, and your friends who wore platform shoes were not somehow unique.
But still, when you're young you're in a prison. There are very few things you can do that aren't connected to some corporation whose main goal is just to make money.
Perhaps criticial thinking is not in decline
An earlier Yahoo article on this mentions adult use of the phrase on Tiktok, if perhaps with different intent: https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/article/the-cryptic-meaning-...
How do we keep falling for this, over and over again? It's old tactics in new names; stop falling for tricks people use to evade your scrutiny and accountability and grow up past your infantilism and naivety. If you are reading this you are likely an adult, and probably a smart one. You can handle some discomfort and I implore you to see past this mainstream carricature of the truth.